Andrea, Ryan’s ex-wife, answered the door. She appeared to be in her early 40s. The moment she saw me, the color drained from her face. She started to close the door.
“Everything has gone beyond my control now.”
I stopped it with my palm and held up Lily’s phone. “Watch this first.”
Andrea barely made it through the first half before tears filled her eyes. When the screen went dark, she stepped back and let us in.
Inside, the walls finished telling the story the video had begun. Ryan was there in framed photos, Andrea smiling beside him, and Jack and Caleb beside them, painfully alive.
That truth hit me so hard I thought I might crumple right there. I glanced at Andrea. “I raised those boys as my own. What did I ever do to deserve this?”
Andrea cried before she answered. Not the kind people put on when they want forgiveness. The kind that comes from old guilt that never fully settled.
“You did nothing, Anna,” she said.
“What did I ever do to deserve this?”
Then she asked us to go with her somewhere. We followed her car to the cemetery on the edge of town. She led us to a headstone and stepped aside.
The moment I saw the name carved into the stone, I couldn’t move.
Ryan, beloved husband & father.
Lily grabbed my hand so hard that it hurt.
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